Grace
The den feels bigger without him in it. He went down the mountain again after midday for food.
Bear rut. I mull the words over. It should sound…biological. Instead, I like it. There’s something satisfying about being the obsession of something big and focused and so damn good with his mouth.
But we need provisions. The rut burns through energy—what he stocked to last us days was gone by this morning—so there was no argument to make.
Still, he stood at the entrance longer than he needed to before he left.
The urge doesn’t want him anywhere but here.
He went anyway, with a wad of cash tucked in his back pocket and promising he’d be back soon.
The cold crept back within the hour. I get up and move around, keeping myself busy.
Months of midnight phone calls taught me to dread being alone with my own head. This isn’t that. I’m sealed in a mountain with one exit and no plan, and I’m fine. I notice it and leave it alone.
The first time he left me alone in here, I went through his stuff looking for a way out. Today I cross the cave, and my feet aren’t hunting anything. I want to look at his things because they’re his. That’s the whole reason, and I don’t examine it too hard.
He doesn’t own much. The pack sits in the corner, packed close and practical—water, rope, a field kit.
A thermal still folded at the bottom that he’s never touched, because the bear runs hot enough without it.
A knife on the ledge in plain leather. Everything dense and ordered, nothing extra.
A man who packs like he’s ready to move in ten minutes.
His jacket is on the low rock near the cot.
I pick it up. Canvas, worn smooth at the collar. His scent comes up first, then mine underneath, and I can’t find where his ends and mine starts anymore. Days of shared heat have run them together.
I press the jacket to my face and hold it there.
Then I go through the pockets.
Left chest: a strip of road map, torn clean, a highway I don’t recognize. Left side: two keys on a plain ring. Right side: a wallet. Brown leather, worn, basic. I open it. A licence. A single card in a name that isn’t his. Some notes. A hardware store loyalty card.
No photographs. No receipts. Nothing that tells me more about him.
I’ve spent so long noticing what people shed—names on scraps, numbers scribbled and dropped, the trail everyone leaves without knowing it. He leaves nothing. There’s not one thing in this wallet he didn’t choose to put there.
Stone scrapes stone behind me.
I have his wallet in one hand and his jacket over my arm.
He comes in and reads the cave in a single pass—pack, ledge, me, what I’m holding. He’s carrying a large bag and a paper cup. He sets both on the ledge.
“Still warm,” he says, nodding at the cup.
Heat climbs the back of my neck. I set the wallet down and leave my hand loose at my side, like I wasn’t just standing in the middle of his den, going through his stuff.
“I wanted to know more about you,” I admit, because why lie? “There was almost nothing to find.”
“No.”
“It’s not a home.” I lift the jacket an inch. “You have other places like this.”
“A few.”
“Those aren’t homes either.”
He thinks about it, unbothered. “No.”
He crosses to the low rock near the cot and sits, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “You could have asked.”
“I know that.”
“Ask me now.”
I collect the cup on my way to the cot and pull the lid. Tea. Milky and strong and still warm, like he said. I complained about tea exactly once—that first day, tied to a rope outside this cave, being difficult on purpose. He never answered me. He heard me, though.
Something in my chest goes warm, and it isn’t the cup.
I sit across from him. “Where do you come from?”
He doesn’t make me work for it. He just starts.
“Cascades. North range. My mother and father held a territory up there. A sister, too.” He watches me.
“They’re still there. I left at twenty and didn’t go back.
It’s what bears do. You love your family, and then you find your own ground.
Bears bond for life when it happens. But the family you’re born to… That, you leave. It’s our nature.”
“So you’ve been alone since twenty.”
“In the way bears are alone.” One shoulder moves. “I tracked on my own for eight years. Then Viktor found me. He needed a tracker who didn’t sit on anyone’s roster. I needed work worth doing. That’s the whole of it.”
I study him. “No tragedy.”
“No.”
“Nothing you’re running from.”
“Would you like there to be?” Dry. No heat in it.
I almost smile. “No.”
He tips his chin at me. “Then tell me yours.”
I look down at the canvas of his jacket. He has the working version already—the drops, the proof-of-life pieces, the months of feeding scraps through a gap behind a hardware store while I told myself none of it could hurt anyone. I gave him that the morning after the dragon, and he knows it all.
He doesn’t know what came before. Nobody does. Not Kaylin. Not the Aurora intake. I gave them clean facts and kept the rest to myself.
“My mother’s name was Mirielle,” I say. “Sangrey was hers. The name runs through the women…her mother carried it, and hers before that, all the way back. The men marry in.”
He goes quiet in the way that means he’s listening with everything.
“She was a witch. My father was a wolf, but not just any wolf. His people carried witch-blood of their own—generations back, thinned out, never gone. That’s the only match the line takes.
Mother used to say the line knows its own.
” I smooth a thread on the canvas. “It’s how Serenity and I came out carrying both. ”
“The glamour.”
“She trained us in it from the time we could walk. Don’t be seen.
Don’t be remembered. It was the only protection she had to give.
There aren’t enough of us to form packs.
We were isolated. Living on the outskirts of a human town, trying not to stand out.
” My thumb stops on the thread. “Then she got sick. Cancer. She fought it, and then she was gone, and everything she’d been holding steady in us started to slip.
Serenity’s magic sits close to the surface.
Our mother kept her level. Without her, it showed.
” I breathe. “The Syndicate found us. It didn’t take them long. ”
“The facility.”
“Both of us.” My arms have crossed without my telling them to. My fingers find the raised lines inside my elbows and press. “They knew what we were from the first blood draw.”
“What did they want?”
“Wolf-witch hybrid. Our magic. They wanted to know how it works. Whether they could pull it out of us and put it into someone else.” I keep my voice level. “They took a lot of blood.” I press down on another ridge in my elbow.
His jaw sets. Just for a second. I take it for anger. God knows there’s enough to be angry about, but somehow, I’ve never had it in me. Maybe it’s good that he’ll hold it for me.
“Serenity couldn’t hold her magic back. It was more visible under stress. So they went at her harder.” The lines under my fingers seem to warm. “She screamed the first time. After that she went quiet. I still don’t know which was worse.”
He doesn’t answer that. He’s right not to.
“I was building a way out. For both of us. I knew the guards, I knew which nights the team ran thin. Then one morning her cell was cleared, and nobody would say where she’d gone.
” My throat wants to close. I push through it.
“A few weeks later my window came. A short-staffed night. A door that should have locked and didn’t.
I pulled the glamour so tight it hurt and walked down a corridor past three men, and not one of them turned around. ”
“And then Aurora.”
“Two nights on farm roads first. An old wolf with a truck found me and didn’t ask a single question.
He drove me to their gate.” I meet his eyes.
“They weren’t raiding facilities back then.
They knew something was happening to people like us—rumors, fragments—but the rescues came later.
Viktor sat across a table from me and told me they’d look for my sister.
I think he meant it. I’m sure he did.” My hands are starting to shake. “Nothing came.”
“And then you found the phone.”
I nod. “In my cubicle. Just lying there.” The shaking spreads up my arms. “I’ve spent months telling myself they moved her because she’s valuable.
If they moved her, she’s somewhere. If she’s somewhere, there’s a way to find her.
” My voice cracks on the next part. “Some nights I can’t hold it.
Some nights I imagine what they’ve been doing to her since I walked down that corridor without her. ”
My jaw locks. My eyes sting and spill anyway.
“She’s twenty-three. Sweet and bright. And I’m the protector. But I’m the one who got out, while she—” The words choke off.
He moves.
He’s beside me before I look up. One arm around my shoulders, then both, and I’m against his chest—warm, solid, asking nothing.
He holds on. No words. No promises. The heat of him soaks through his shirt into the back of my neck, and the shaking runs itself out against him because for once I’m not the only thing holding me up.
His heartbeat stays slow under my ear. I hang on to the sound.
“I will not rest,” I say. “Not until I find her.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to get her out.”
“I know that too.”
The silence settles. The hard man with the empty wallet and no photographs turns out to be the softest place I’ve ever landed.
After a while, my breathing evens out. “Decker…”
“You don’t have to thank me for that,” he says, before I can.
“You can’t know I was going to.”
His mouth moves. A soft smile. “I know you.”
Three words, and they land deeper than anything else he’s said today. I stay where I am and let the cave be quiet around us.
Finally, he eases back, his arms loosening as he steps away. He takes the phone Viktor gave him off the ledge and turns it once in his hand.
“The call,” I say.
“Won’t take long.”
There it is again. The thing under his steadiness. It was there the night after we first slept together, when I lay against his chest and knew he was awake and carrying something.
He’s three steps from the entrance. I could ask him right now.
I don’t. My eyes are still swollen, and the quiet between us is too new, and some part of me isn’t ready for whatever answer costs him this much silence.
The stone rolls back, and he steps out into the dark.
The boulder seals, and I sit in his den with the tea going cold in my hands and the question I didn’t ask sitting exactly where he left it.